Still fascinated with this blogger app, just trying to link it to Facebook. Of course I've googled it and got some instructions, however my 'flu addled brain is ............... somewhat addled and things aren't making sense. Maybe tomorrow

Wouldn't this make a lovely quilt? The colours are just divine. There are so many quilts to make, sometimes it gets a bit daunting with all the ideas and it all wears me down. However it's the colours, the calculations of size and yardage, working out the piecing and then the keystone that it all hangs off, the quilting, because as you all know that piecing is the the character of the quilt and quilting is the soul.

I was reading Bonnie Hunter's blog via Facebook where she mentioned that there was an app, there's always an app, for blogger (or bugger as it is sometimes referred to) so here I go. If it doesn't work there's delete.

It's a bit cold and damp here in Paradise - my faithful hot water bottle sprung a leak.  Never to worry - there are another three in the cupboard awaiting to make their debut.  Will it be another blue one, or the purple or red one?  Quite warm outside and really rather chilly in the bedroom, I can see that I will have to go outside to get some warmth.

Just had a call from Hostel Boy, I love to hear his voice, unfortunately he has hurt his hand and needs an xray.  Initially it was for 3pm TOMORROW.  I rang the Hostel and said that I thought that was too long, which thankfully they agreed with me, and they did the heavy and he is in for 3.45pm today.  From what he has said I think that it is heavily bruised.  Better to be safe than sorry.  I still get a feeling of joy when I hear his voice on the 'phone, will that feeling be replaced with that of trepidation?

This a group of us working at our local Arts Council on a quilt made for a very dear friend whose son died recently.

And the final quilt and we finally gave it to her yesterday.  Many tears.

This is one of the things that I did today ALL BY MYSELF.  Sorry for the shouting but it was fantastic.  No children, no spouse.

I also picked up my new sunglasses (in my favourite Blues Brothers style) with the darkest tint that they make.  And my eyes went 'Aaaaaaaah'.  The library also figured in my day - always a great destination - and went to a fabric shop.  

My friend the Librarian loves blue work and made a beautiful top. Some of the stitchery blocks were designed by one of her lovely children, others come from Bronwyn Hayes of Red Brolly as well as an old favourite from Jean Jensen that she designed many years ago for candlewicking. These were combined so well with a variety of pieced blocks, all surrounded by timeless ticking. So I was lucky enough to be allowed to quilt it - all freehanded with some rule work in the crosshatching and baptist fans in the outer border.

This is what 58 of the little tackers look like.

   Looking at the area that these cover, I am probably looking at around 200. If you too wish to follow this path of idiocy stash busting  go to Keryn's site and there is a PDF pattern to buy and it is all downloaded through the internet with the pattern emailed to you. Easy peasy, as long as you have a printer.  Blogless Kathy has of course finished hers, mine is residing in a tin and I have no idea how many I have stitched.  Might be a good project to take to the weekly sewing group that I am hoping to start going to again, that's after I have finished the nine patch thing that I started a while ago and is in another tin.  I just have to find them all in their secreted spots.  Out of sight, out of mind.

Hmm, on another note the top of my blogger composing box has changed and there appears to be no spell chech.  Maybe I have removed it in my latest bout of housekeeping.  It has put the strikethrough in, which I can see getting a good workout.  I Just had a look in the Blogger help and they were so focussed on getting the new editor out on time and speel check wasn't working so they left it out.  Blogger!

This is one of those Vintage Valentine and I am kicking myself as I only took one picture and not a very good one. None of the detail that I did on the central vase is shown - lots of work and it really came up a treat. Bummer. At the time all the sweeties were otherwise engaged and it was too much to rig the quilt up for pictures, now I wish that I had. Oh well - I might see it again one day and be able to take some more.

Early this year we, at Niki and the Strippers, made Scrappy Bargello quilts. Participants were encouraged to cut extra strips to make a quilt to be raffle and the money to be given to a local organisation to help others and this quilt is the result. Niki and the Strippers evolved because I thought that there was a place for a fun group in our Arts Council to use strips either from the infamous Jelly Rolls/Bali Pops or most importantly their own stashes to extend their quilt making experience and have FUN.

I run the classes on the last Saturday of the month, and give the opportunity for people to come free of charge and just sew. People seem to become consumed with matching colours and really the one of the ideas behind patchwork was to use what you had to make beautiful, useful items to keep your family warm. The participants had to cut two sets of strips, keep one set and put the other one in a lucky dip box and then go in and take out the same number that they put in. If they baulked at their choices I had some VERY striking fabric that they could have instead. Hmmm.......I wonder why no one took my up on my rather riotous fabric? One of the participant s pulled out the day before the class claiming that she wasn't ready. Later she confessed that it was because we weren't going to match our fabrics and regretted not coming as the results were fantastic and she realised that she really had missed out on a great time. One very dear friend had an ongoing war with her sewing machine, and now after sewing 4x32 stratas together, for her Scrappy Bargello, claims that her and her sewing machine are one. All good fun.

The pattern for this quilt (Scrappy Trip Around the World) and the Scrappy Bargello came from Bonnie K Hunter's Quiltville

The quilting pattern is a new one from Lorien Quilting called Continuous Feathers and I think it's smashing. The thread? An Aurilux variegated that fitted the scrappiness of the quilt. The lustre of the thread adds another dimension

This quilt was made from Amy Butler and Jane Sassaman samples that I bought from eBay, quilted it with a pattern from Lorien Quilting and with lime green thread.

When I first saw the line drawing for this quilt I knew that I had to quilt it.

Unfortunately it wanted to be in white. So out went the carpet runner that I have in front of my machine and out come the microfibre broom and I swept before every row.

I find this colour to be the worst for attracting EVERY speck of dust, thread, and lowflying nano bug.

That plastic bag you see on the ground before the quilt is what it lives in. I fear to put it on the bed as I know that the Hairiest One will come home, he always does, and sit on the bed while he takes various items of clothes off. It will not stay white.

The back is my favourite. It's a piece that I have been saving for a few years and thought that this was the quilt for it. All these photos when clicked on should take you to a bigger picture.

So the middle pattern was too big for my machine's throat so I quilted all the rows up to it and then left 20" and continued quilting through the rest of the rows and then I came back and did the centre row. I did it this way as I needed time to think of what I was going to do with the centre. When I do the quilt again I will quilt it as I go through. So when I went back to do the centre row I lined it all put and hit the start button and of it went and I only quilted the bits that I wanted it to using my abort and restart buttons and jogging to the start of areas that I wanted quilted. Then I used a combination of freehand and Compuquilter to create the frame where the medallion centres were to go. The area where the crosshatching was meant, I McTeed a lot. With regard to the orientation of the quilt, I prefer it to be landscaped is for me I find it more pleasing. In the future, I will try and quilt the entire computerised part in a day and I will have more even side tension. The quilt layers were basted together before I started doing any of the quilting, which was quite an undertaking, however this was all done with the machine sewing straight line very slowly.

It is all quilted with an Aurilux thread of basically the same colour and added a bit more to the quilting instead of the flatness of cotton there was a bit of lustre.

This is part of a wholecloth pattern, from Joanne Knott, that I wanted to try out to see if it would work and it was gorgeous. If you click on the link to Joanne it will take you straight to the page for the pattern which is for STATLER quilting system. I DO NOT have a statler I have a Compuquilter, however Compuquilter will now take the qli files that Statler uses. Great.The throat area that I can quilt with when in computer mode is restricted, and therefore this pattern wouldn't work at the 20" depth that it is designed. I used shot silk again, this time I used Aurilux in a maroon. The Aurilux thread has a lovely lustre, and the problems that I had with the thread slipping on the spool were eliminated by using a thread sock when using it to quilt on the machine and also when I wind the bobbins.

Joanne has done a superb job with this pattern and it was very easy to quilt out. I have quilted her whole cloth strippy with a variation in the centre strip to enable me to quilt the wholecloth at the size that Joanne intended. This is quilt will feature tomorrow.

This is a piece of shot silk that I quilted up with my favourite green Aurifil with an all over pattern from Keryn Emmerson. The fabric was amazingly easy to use and presented no problems.

The idea behind this quilt was to use a plain piece of fabric and insert a strip of colour to add some interest.

One day I was at sewing and a friend was throwing out the end piece off her strata strip. The colours and fabrics were gorgeous and included come of her own hand dyes - it really was too good to pass by. I combined it with a piece of cream homespun that I had laying around and then searched for the ideal binding. So this is Trudy's scraps and Trudy was surprised.

This is a small sample that I did to see if it could work and delightfully it did. The big one that I ended up making, for the Field of Quilts 2007 raffle, was beautiful and was won by a woman who was visiting from Tasmania.

I used vintage white cotton sateen, Aurifil thread for the motifs in a darker colour to increase the depth, One Song Needle Arts pattern called Janice with Attitude, which unfortunately I don't think is available anymore at One Song, however it is now available in a set from Digi-Tech or a single block from Digi-Tech, two layers of wadding - one cotton and the other polyester and McTavishing to flatten the areas around the blocks.

It too is unbound at this time.

People often think that for me to quilt for them they have to have a pieced top. With being the feature quilter at the Field of Quilts I wanted to show that a plain piece of fabric could be quilted and be striking and beautiful.
I also wanted to take it a step further and show them that other fabrics besides cotton could be used with fantastic effect. This is a piece of green synthetic silk(?) that I bought out of a remnant bin. The thread was my favourite Aurifil yukky green. The pattern used, there's only one, is a Kathy Olson from Just Quilting Designs, with a bit! of McTavishing in between motifs. This one is unbound at the moment, I ran out of time.

This is a piece that I quilted to make a lizard. As you can see it's a pretty flat lizard and is really no lizard at all. I use it to show people as a sample - it is very tactile. I quilted the 'pebbles' using an Aurifil metallic thread that I bought from Always Quilting. The fabric is a piece that I dyed and I used 100% cotton wadding.

I think that there is a photo of this quilt somewhere in the past however I thought that I would show it again and tell you the story behind this particular quilt.

Last year, about this time I asked the soon to be Hostel Boy whether he would like a quilt to take with him to the Hostel. 'No, I don't need one' was his gallant reply. Probably due to the fact that I was running around frantically, as usual. Come the DAY before leaving for the Hostel - 'So Mum, where's my quilt?' He didn't have his quilt that day or the next, however he received his Hostel quilt for his 13th birthday a month later. I pieced and quilted the top in one day with what I had on hand and it came up a treat. The quilting pattern is by Hermoine Agee from Lorien Quilitng called 'Ebb and Flow'. Hermoine has two pattern web sites one for paper patterns and the other for digital patterns. Lovely woman, lovely patterns and Australian as well.

This next one was a pattern that I have wanted to do for a while, and not necessarily on red however this is the path that the quilt took.

There were some problems with getting things to line up and the next one will be done slightly differently and with more side tension. However for a first effort, I was VERY pleased. The top is made with RED cotton sateen. If you wish to buy some of this, I have another 25m to use and even for me it is an excessive amount.

For a bit of relief and jest, I put a big check gingham on the back and it came up a treat. The patterns that I used are Dawn Cheetham's Wedding Ring Sets.

I have been quilting - you will be amazed how much I have done, however I am one boy down to help with photographing the quilts and the Hairiest Sweetie is NOT the best helper as he talks back. The younger Sweeties are very well trained as they have been helping me for years and know EXACTLY how I need the quilts presented. The Hairiest one is most argumentative. Just can't get good help these days. Consequently I took these photos with no help and they are okay, at least there is something to help me remember what did.

Here is another from a long time ago. The words are gentleness, love, peace, goodness, patience, self-caring, joy, faithfulness, kindness, however I think that it needs the word humour stitched into it somewhere. All the words are very admirable, however humour would be the thing that gives it the spark and make all okay.

The door is between the front lounge and the kitchen and is our old front door that the four of us sanded back and oiled one afternoon. The builders of the house made it from the leftover Jarrah floorboards, from when they built our house in the 1930s. The toilet door was also of the same construction and made at the same time. It is one of the features of this style of house that the dunny (toilet) door would be made from the leftover boards. The hairiest Sweetie built the door frame, side light and hung the door to block off the rest of the house as I used to quilt in the front lounge and had people dropping and picking up quilts. They were quite nosy at times and would take off for a tour of the house! So a door was the best option and then I knew that the youngest Sweeties could be vegged out on the couch without complete strangers walking through and conversing with them. Remember humour - it's always important. As are the other things on the stitchery.